"All general ideas are purely intellectual: if the imagination intervenes to the least degree, the idea immediately becomes particular".
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
A Discourse on Inequality
A mirror: something that reflects my image back to me. A generally accepted concept, one that time and time again has proven true to me. Does this past experience mean it will continue to be true?
"What is possible can never be demonstrated to be false; and it is possible the course of nature may change, since we can concieve such a change...All probable arguments are built on the supposition that there is this conformity betwixt the future and the past, and therefore can never prove it".
- David Hume
From "A Treatise of Human Nature"
Probable argument is dependent on past experience, yet, past cannot predict the future with any certainty, and thus, reason is little more than a "good guess". Because I cannot say with certainty, that the mirror will continue to reflect my image back to me, is my concept of a mirror false? Is it possible to "know" without this sense of "knowledge"?
"In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue".
- Karl Marx
From "Reflections on the Revolution in France"
Is the only way to know, to unknow? Is the only way to experience to forget? (To unknow must one first know? To forget must one first experience?)
"The soviergn begins when, with the necessities ensured, the possibility of life opens up without limit".
- Georges Bataille
The Accursed Share
2 comments:
Re: your point about Hume. N.B. that he thinks we can make predictions, and make good ones all the time, because experience and culture assist us in this task. When does it become useful and necessary to question experience and culture and hope/create a different outcome, a billiard ball that goes in a direction different from the one all experience leads us to expect?
I think its necessary that we question experience and culture inorder to seek truth and freedom. Time is not (consistently) identifiable, for a minute to me is not a minute to you, and a year at age 80 is most certainly not a year at age 4. Thus, "experience," a function of time, is also uncertain. While experience allows one to assume that the billard ball will move in the same direction it always has, or that the sun will rise each morning, declaring it a truth is like letting the blind lead the blind (nor is it unlike the ratio of unicorns to leprechauns!). When these assumptions/expectations carry over from the direction of the billard ball and the arrival of the new day to "rights," justice changes impedes upon freedom as it changes the meaning from a "freedom from" restraint, restriction, etc. to a "freedom to" the rights every man is owed.
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